1. Technical Field
The invention relates to information services. More particularly, the invention relates to predictive information services.
2. Description of the Background Art
4-1-1 is the telephone number for local directory assistance in the United States and Canada. The services of 4-1-1 queries are often outsourced to a call center that specializes in that function. Historically, when a single carrier provided most of the telephony services for a region, the data used to satisfy the search could exclusively come for that carrier's subscriber rolls. Today, when the market is fragmented amongst many carriers, the data must be aggregated by a data aggregator specializing in directory listings, such as LSSi. The data aggregator distributes the data to the 4-1-1 services either on a live basis, actually servicing each query, or by periodically transferring large swaths of listings to the call center's systems for local searching.
The data aggregator collects the data from the rolls of many telecommunication carriers. Some carriers, such as Vonage, do not send their customer rolls to the aggregator. Their customers can get their listings in the directory assistance database using a free service such as ListYourself.net.
Directory assistance systems incorporate a wide range of automation to reduce the cost of human operators. Almost all systems use custom database software to locate listings quickly. Most directory assistance systems use automated read back systems to give out the phone number. This frees the directory assistance operator to move on to another caller as soon as the correct listing is located.
Some systems have store and forward technology which records the “city and state” that the caller is requesting and then plays the city and state speech to the operator before the operator comes online and then says “Residential or business listing?” or simply “What listing please?”
Interactive voice response systems have been added to many directory assistance systems. These complex systems use speech recognition and recorded speech or speech synthesis to handle the entire call without live operator intervention. Most systems recognize location and listing. If recognition confidence is high, the best result is played to the caller. If confidence is low, the caller's request is played back to a live operator, who locates the correct listing.
In all cases, little progress has been made in addressing the increased demands for more information than merely a telephone number when a user requests information with his phone. For example, a user may want to find a category of goods or services, and not merely a specific telephone number. Further, modern smartphones allow the user to receive and navigate within much more information than is provided by traditional 4-1-1 services. As such, live operator support for such service is prohibitively expensive and user navigation within such information becomes daunting.